This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct a variety of household surveys, and the information base in developing countries with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. In so doing, it also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of flexible computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The book volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on 'estimation in practice', a series of 11 case studies where the code streams are operationalized, as well as a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.

This book documents and explains the remarkable decline in the American marriage rate that began about 1970. This decline has occurred in spite of the fact that married people are better off than unmarried people in many ways. Many other attempts to explain the "retreat from marriage" blame it on culture change involving a devaluation of marriage, and/or on ignorance of the benefits of marriage among the unmarried population. In turn, because unmarried adults and single-parent families are poorer than others, poverty and its associated problems are attributed to the failure to marry. The argument presented here is that the declining marriage rate is due to the deteriorating position of workers, particularly men, in the American economy. Not only have jobs disappeared and wages decreased, especially for the less-educated, but existing jobs have become more precarious. Less-educated workers can't count on having jobs in the future, and can't count on earning enough to support families if they have jobs because their wages have stagnated. In this economic environment, the flexibility to change partners becomes a survival strategy for the economically marginalized population, which has been increasing in size for the past four decades. Arrangements such as cohabitation allow for this flexibility; marriage does not. This argument implies that marriage is not a realistic choice for many Americans. In fact, it is a choice that many people don't actually have. Marriages between economically marginal men and women would not eventuate in the benefits that middle-class people experience when they marry, and would eliminate an option they may need to survive in the face of unrelenting poverty. We won't convince these people that marriage would improve their lives, because in most cases it wouldn't be true. To return the marriage rate to its pre-1970 level, we need to address the economic factors that have caused the decline.

Globally, poverty affects millions of people's lives each day. Children are hungry, many lack the means to receive an education, and many are needlessly ill. It is a common scene to see an impoverished town surrounded by trash and polluted air. There is a need to debunk the myths surrounding the impoverished and for strategies to be crafted to aid their situations. Sociological Perspectives on Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction in Rural Populations is an authored book that seeks to clarify the understanding of poverty reduction in a substantive way and demonstrate the ways that poverty is multifaceted and why studying poverty reduction matters. The 12 chapters in this volume contribute to existing and new areas of knowledge production in the field of development studies, poverty knowledge production, and gender issues in the contemporary African experience. The book utilizes unique examples drawn purposely from select African countries to define, highlight, raise awareness, and clarify the complexity of rural poverty. Covering topics such as indigenous knowledge, sustainable development, and child poverty, this book provides an indispensable resource for sociology students and professors, policymakers, social development officers, advocates for the impoverished, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been one of the world's most dynamic and fastest-growing regions over the years. Its average combined GDP growth rate is more than 6% and the total combined GDP was valued at US$3.0 trillion in 2018. ASEAN countries have managed to significantly reduce their national poverty over the last few decades. Although a correlation exists between economic growth and poverty reduction, millions of people in ASEAN countries still do not have sufficient incomes to fulfill their basic needs including food, shelter, clothes and sanitation.This book is a collection of working group papers contributed by members of Network of ASEAN-China Think-tanks (NACT) and covers best practices on poverty alleviation in ASEAN member states as well as in China, and ASEAN-China cooperation. It discusses experiences of ASEAN member states and China such as with regard to national policies, principles, definitions, approaches, progress, and challenges in poverty reduction. It reviews and evaluates the way forward including existing joint projects, opportunities, and challenges in the future cooperation and offers policy recommendations from both national and regional perspectives to help policymakers better cope with the daunting poverty challenges.

This book examines the underlying assumptions and implications of how we conceptualise and investigate poverty. The empirical entry point for such inquiry is a series of research initiatives that have used mixed method, combined qualitative and quantitative, or Q-Squared ( Q(2)) approaches, to poverty analysis. The Q(2) literature highlights the vast range of analytical tools within the social sciences that may be used to understand and explain social phenomena, along with interesting research results. This literature serves as a lens to probe issues about knowledge claims made in poverty debates concerning who are the poor (identification analysis) and why they are poor (causal analysis). Implicitly or explicitly, questions are raised about the reasons for emphasising different dimensions of poverty and favouring different units of knowledge, the basis for distinguishing valid and invalid claims, the meaning of causation, and the nature of causal inference, and so forth. Q(2) provides an entry point to address foundational issues about assumptions underlying approaches to poverty, and applied issues about the strengths and limitations of different research methods and the ways they may be fruitfully combined. Together, the strands of this inquiry make a case for methodological pluralism on the grounds that knowledge is partial, empirical adjudication imperfect, social phenomena complex, and mixed methods add value for understanding and explanation. Ultimately, the goals of understanding and explanation are best served if research questions dictate the choice of methodological approach rather than the other way around.

Today's globalised world means offshore finance, airport boutiques and high-speed Internet for some people, against dollar-a-day wages, used t-shirts, and illiteracy for others. How do these highly skewed global distributions happen, and what can be done to counter them? New Rules for Global Justice engages with widespread public disquiet around global inequality. It explores (mal)distributions in relation to country, class, gender and race, with international examples drawn from Australia to Zimbabwe. The book is action-oriented and empowering, presenting concrete proposals for 'new rules' in regard to climate change, corruption, finance, food, investment, the Internet, migration and more.

Homelessness in America's cities remains a growing problem. The homeless today face the same challenges as in years past: poverty, tenuous or no ties to family and friends, physical and mental health issues, and substance abuse. Compared to the 1950s to 1970s, more homeless are now sleeping on city streets versus in shelters or single room hotels. Homelessness rates are affected by economic trends, lack of equitable and inclusive healthcare and housing, decline in public assistance programs, and natural and man-made disasters. This collection of essays covers case studies, innovations, practices and policies of municipalities coping with homelessness in the 21st century.

We live in an increasingly prosperous world, yet the estimated number of undernourished people has risen, and will continue to rise with the doubling of food prices. A large majority of those affected are living in India. Why have strategies to combat hunger, especially in India, failed so badly? How did a nation that prides itself on booming economic growth come to have half of its preschool population undernourished?
Using the case study of a World Bank nutrition project in India, this book takes on these questions and probes the issues surrounding development assistance, strategies to eliminate undernutrition, and how hunger should be fundamentally understood and addressed.
Throughout the book, the underlying tension between choice and circumstance is explored. How much are individuals able to determine their life choices? How much should policy-makers take underlying social forces into account when designing policy? This book examines the possibilities, and obstacles, to eliminating child hunger.
This book is not just about nutrition. It is an attempt to uncover the workings of power through a close look at the structures, discourses, and agencies through which nutrition policy operates. In this process, the source of nutrition policy in the World Bank is traced to those affected by the policies in India.

Nuanced interconnections of poverty and educational attainment around the UK are surveyed in this unique analysis. Across the four jurisdictions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, experts consider the impact of curriculum reforms and devolved policy making on the lives of children and young people in poverty. They investigate differences in educational ideologies and structures, and question whether they help or hinder schools seeking to support disadvantaged and marginalised groups. For academics and students engaged in education and social justice, this is a vital exploration of poverty's profound effects on inequalities in educational attainment and the opportunities to improve school responses.

The New Southern European Diaspora: Youth, Unemployment, and Migration uses a qualitative and ethnographic approach to investigate the movement of young adults from areas in southern Europe that are still impacted by the 2008 economic crisis. With a particular focus on Spain, Portugal, and Italy, Ricucci examines the difficulties faced by young adults who are entering the labor market and are developing plans to move abroad. Ricucci further investigates mobility and its drivers, relationships among mobile youth and their social networks, perceptions of intra-European Union youth mobility, and the role of institutions, especially schools, in the development of mobility plans. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, political science, and economics.

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how povertyis constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people's movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized. In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty-whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthrocapitalist foundations-as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.

In "A People's War on Poverty," Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program's implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city.

At the center of this book are the vitally important but virtually forgotten grassroots activists who administered federal War on Poverty programs, including church ministers, federal program volunteers, students, local administrators, civil rights activists, and the poor themselves. The moderate Great Society liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal programs certainly galvanized local antipoverty activists in Houston. However, their antipoverty philosophy was driven further by prophetic religious traditions and visions of participatory democracy and community organizing championed by the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. By focusing on these local actors, Phelps shows that grassroots activists in Houston were influenced by a much more diverse set of intellectual and political traditions, fueling their efforts to expand the meaning of democracy. Ultimately, this episode in Houston's history reveals both the possibilities and the limits of urban democracy in the twentieth century.

Income disparity for students in both K-12 and higher education settings has become increasingly apparent since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of these changes, impoverished students face a variety of challenges both internal and external. Educators must deepen their awareness of the obstacles students face beyond the classroom to support learning. Traditional literacy education must evolve to become culturally, linguistically, and socially relevant to bridge the gap between poverty and academic literacy opportunities. Poverty Impacts on Literacy Education develops a conceptual framework and pedagogical support for literacy education practices related to students in poverty. The research provides protocols supporting student success through explored connections between income disparity and literacy instruction. Covering topics such as food insecurity, integrated instruction, and the poverty narrative, this is an essential resource for administration in both K-12 and higher education settings, professors and teachers in literacy, curriculum directors, researchers, instructional facilitators, pre-service teachers, school counselors, teacher preparation programs, and students.

This book presents a multidimensional, psychosocial and critical understanding of poverty by bringing together studies carried out with groups in different contexts and situations of deprivation in Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Spain. The book is divided in two parts. The first part presents studies that unveil the psychosocial implications of poverty by revealing the processes of domination based on the stigmatization and criminalization of poor people, which contribute to maintain realities of social inequality. The second part presents studies focused on strategies to fight poverty and forms of resistance developed by individuals who are in situations of marginalization.The studies presented in this contributed volume depart from the theoretical framework developed by Critical Social Psychology, Community Psychology and Liberation Psychology, in an effort to understand poverty beyond its monetary dimension, bringing social, cultural, structural and subjective factors into the analysis. Psychological science in general has not produced specific knowledge about poverty as a result of the relations of domination produced by social inequalities fostered by the capitalist system. This book seeks to fill this gap by presenting a psychosocial perspective with psychological and sociological bases aligned in a dialectical way in order to understand and confront poverty. Psychosocial Implications of Poverty - Diversities and Resistances will be of interest to social psychologists, sociologists and economists interested in multidimensional studies of poverty, as well as to policy makers and activists directly working with the development of policies and strategies to fight poverty.

Surviving Poverty carefully examines the experiences of people living below the poverty level, looking in particular at the tension between social isolation and social ties among the poor. Joan Maya Mazelis draws on in-depth interviews with poor people in Philadelphia to explore how they survive and the benefits they gain by being connected to one another. Half of the study participants are members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a distinctive organization that brings poor people together in the struggle to survive. The mutually supportive relationships the members create, which last for years, even decades, contrast dramatically with the experiences of participants without such affiliation. In interviews, participants discuss their struggles and hardships, and their responses highlight the importance of cultivating relationships among people living in poverty. Surviving Poverty documents the ways in which social ties become beneficial and sustainable, allowing members to share their skills and resources and providing those living in similar situations a space to unite and speak collectively to the growing and deepening poverty in the United States. The study concludes that productive, sustainable ties between poor people have an enduring and valuable impact. Grounding her study in current debates about the importance of alleviating poverty, Mazelis proposes new modes of improving the lives of the poor. Surviving Poverty is invested in both structural and social change and demonstrates the power support services can have to foster relationships and build sustainable social ties for those living in poverty.

In this seminal book, Krumer-Nevo introduces the Poverty-Aware Paradigm: a radical new framework for social workers and professionals working with and for people in poverty. The author defines the core components of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm, explicates its embeddedness in key theories in poverty, critical social work and psychoanalysis, and links it to diverse facets of social work practice. Providing a revolutionary new way to think about how social work can address poverty, she draws on the extensive application of the paradigm by social workers in Israel and across diverse poverty contexts to provide evidence for the practical advantages of integrating the Poverty-Aware Paradigm into social work practices across the globe.